Thousands of customers’ details accessed following Bettys data breach

Dan Windham

More than 100,000 online Bettys customers have had their personal details accessed following a data breach.

Bettys.co.uk issued an email to all 120,000 of their online customers on their website database today informing them that the site had been affected by a data breach.

The breach occurred following an industry-wide software weakness which allowed someone to illegally gain access to personal customer data.

Information including names, email addresses, postal addresses, encrypted passwords and telephone numbers of customers could have been accessed as a result of the breach.

However, Bettys stressed that credit or debit card details could not have been copied as the information is storied on a separate system managed by a ‘certified third party’.

A spokesperson for Bettys said: “Bettys takes customer confidentiality extremely seriously and we have carried out a full investigation with our security partners. The software issue has been addressed and further security measures have been put in place.

“Whilst customer passwords were encrypted, there is a risk that they could still be vulnerable so, we’re contacting all customers with details of the situation and advice regarding password protection.

“It’s a completely unprecedented event for us and we’re extremely sorry that the breach has occurred.”

The company have now urged all their online customers to change their passwords on the website as soon as possible and warned them to do the same for other websites where the same password was used.